The present period of history has been termed by many the information age. Every business and nearly every field of human activity is involved with references, instructions, briefs, periodicals, articles, books, electronic files, video files, and the like. In the area of electronic files, the term multimedia has been applied to mean systems capable of dealing with and displaying/playing electronic files of many sorts. It is clear that an enormous amount of human effort goes into preparing all of these files and documents, and a large portion of that time is devoted to editing such documents.
In the present discussion, problems described below as extant in the art extend in the present day to all sorts of electronic files and the end results of such files. Examples are provided to illustrate the sorts of problems to which the present invention is directed, but it will be clear to those with skill in the art that these problems attain in other areas, and the invention is applicable in such areas as well. For example, many of the problems that exist can he described with reference to the processes of reduction of ideas to hard-copy documents; the same problems, it will be clear, pertain also to reduction of ideas to such as video recordings, movies, and multimedia files of all sorts. It is to be understood, then, that in the remarks and examples that follow, although the examples may be limited to such processes as creating hard copy text documents from original human thought, the same processes or clear alternatives may also apply to different end results (multimedia presentations of all sorts).
As short a time as twenty-five years before the present invention personal computers were not yet developed, and the computers that were available, with some few exceptions, were less powerful in general than personal computers are today. In this time the process of creating documents was done in one or another of limited and limiting ways. The author of a text document, for example, could compose on-the-fly at a typewriter keyboard, or he or she could dictate copy orally to be typed and edited later. In the latter case, dictation could be to a person competent in the art of shorthand or one of the shorthand machines such as court recorders use, or to a tape recorder, which a typist would listen to at a later time to make a hard copy of the verbal input.
In these good old days, many authors of documents were either competent typists or became competent typists. Many others were not typists and had no interest in becoming typists, and were hence limited to dictation of one sort or another. Editing was a chore to be done after a draft was ready. In many cases if not most, to get a document to final form required several iterative edits.
With the advent of personal computers and word processing software applications electronic text documents have become common, bringing new capability to composition and authorship. The same advances in computers have made possible electronic recording and processing of other sorts as well in the fields of graphics, photography, video, and the like. In the field of text processing, word processors have enjoyed rapid development, and state-of-the-art word processing applications today provide powerful tools for rendering human thought into electronic text documents integrating text with formulas, tables, computer-generated graphics, and computerized photography.
Still, even with powerful word processing techniques many talented and creative people have limited interface skills to personal computers. That is, they still can't type competently, and have to rely on old-fashioned dictation to prepare electronic documents, wherein a second party translates recorded information into machine-readable text by typing into a computer word processor. These people include those who are in one way or another handicapped, and unable to type. Some are physically handicapped, and some have other limitations such as dyslexia.
Even for those creative people who are skilled and competent typists, however, and who have mastered the techniques of composing at the keyboard as well as editing with a word processor, the available tools for rendering human thought into machine-operable text code and finally into edited and finished documents impose strict limitations on human creativity. No human can type as fast as he or she can speak, and certainly not as fast as he or she can think. And, since humans have essentially single channel activity, output is thus severely limited when a composer is forced to compose or edit at a keyboard.
It is well-known that many millions of dollars have been spent by a number of organizations in the hope of developing useful voice-recognition systems which will recognize human speech and render it into machine-operable text code. This may be, when fully-realized, a fairly effective solution to the problems discussed herein. One could then render a first draft as fast as one can speak, then edit the electronic document. Unfortunately such systems have been less than wildly successful, and those that do work at least marginally require considerable computer power.
The problems in general voice recognition also are far from trivial. Different people say the same things in vastly different ways while ostensibly speaking the same language. Most people also run-on in speech, and a machine has a real problem determining where one word ends and another begins. Many decisions on alternative possibilities in speech recognition have to be made on the basis of context and/or grammar, comparing input with enormous amounts of pre-recorded information, and following very complicated software routines. Good speech recognition, when and if accomplished, is a job for powerful computers, while the real need is for systems capable of being used on portable and hand-held machines.
Even further with voice-recognition systems, even if they were to work seamlessly, they impose an additional burden. That is that the very first draft of any document is instantly turned into machine-operable text code. Subsequent editing still has to be done from a keyboard, and editing is often a bigger job than the original composition of a first draft. It would be much more efficient and much faster to a finished document if one could not only dictate a first draft, but then carefully edit by voice until the composition is in finished form, before turning the composition into machine-operable text code.
What is clearly needed in the area of conception and preparation of text documents is a system that greatly enhances a user's ability to voice record and voice edit prior to transcription. Such a system should record audio in a digital fashion and provide for what is known in film editing as jogging, which is the process of locating portions of a recorded entity to be edited. Functions allowing a user to fully-edit by voice before transcription is required would greatly speed the creative process.
As such a system as that described herein as desirable is essentially a recording and transcription system, it risks being heir to difficulties of such systems, such as the time-consuming process of editing a first draft after the draft is prepared from recorded input. The problem here is that the editing is done at the wrong time, after the recording is transcribed into machine-readable code. Much time and effort could be saved if full editing could be done in the audio form so the digitally recorded audio could be provided to a typist or data entry person in fully-edited, final form.
The system of the invention, as applied to creation of text documents, to solve the problem of incremental editing of machine-operable text code, which requires use of a keyboard, or editing in hard-copy form, should provide for rapid audio review and for abilities to edit voice recording much as a word processor electronic document is edited, such as recording over previous input, marking and moving or deleting existing data, inserting new voice-recorded date between other regions of data, and the like. With such an enhanced tool, a creative person could dictate a document which would be electronically recorded as digital audio, and then fully and rapidly edit the document either in the process of composition or after first composition as desired. A fully -edited, digitized audio file may then be provided to a competent typist or data entry person, either as a floppy disk or over a network connection such as the Internet, who can translate the audio via a keyboard directly into machine-readable text code, providing a finished document with a high degree of assurance that the document is in final form.
The functions described herein for digitized voice files are also useful for file records of other types of natural data, where natural data, like speech patterns, is considered to be streaming, unformatted data, unlike text code.
It is these objects to which the invention fully described below is directed.